Word: goat-boy
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Barth is fond these days of recounting the origin of Giles Goat-Boy, his next novel. It seems that critics of The Sot-Weed Factor began commenting on the similarity between that novel's protagonist and the archetypal mythic hero--with his innocence, his rite of sexual initiation, his quest and so on. Barth himself protests that such similarity was quite unconscious, but once alerted, he set out to make good use of it. Written with the same complexity of plot and wild comedy that filled The Sot-Weed Factor. Giles Goat-Boy is the tale of George Giles, Everyhero...
...Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor were investigations into the novel in all its massiveness and variety, storytelling released to its infinite possibilities. By the end of the sixties, though. Barth was looking in a new direction, and Lost in the Funhouse (1969) was a radical departure from everything that had preceded it in Barth's career. A collection of highly experimental stories, the volume was subtitled "Fiction for Print. Tape, Live Voice," and was originally scheduled for publication accompanied by tapes. Packaging prohibited it, and this certainly kept Barth's effort from full realization. In any case...
...most novels would lead one to believe. The problem is that Barth keeps turning up afterward looking as fresh as if he had only just come back from a day sail. From The Floating Opera and The End of the Road to The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, there is no real urgency in Earth's novels. His characters exhibit a comfortable, charming nihilism. Fat with alternatives, they can change roles as easily as socks. As an immortal resident of Parnassus tells the hallucinating hero of The Sot-Weed Factor, "There's really naught...
...Charles' existential updating, however, there is no sacrificial ram to substitute for Isaac and no hand of God to stop Abraham's knife. The New Satyricon often reads like a pegged-leg parody of both William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy...
LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE, by John Barth. When read straight through, these 14 experimental pieces of fiction by the author of Giles Goat-Boy interact to produce a series of enticing illusions...